Home > Author > Madeleine L'Engle
1 " Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. "
― Madeleine L'Engle
2 " Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit "
― Madeleine L'Engle , A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1)
3 " Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous. "
4 " But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them.—Ditta "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Joys of Love
5 " I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. "
6 " In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
7 " A great ring of pure & endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heartAnd breaks apart the dusky clouds of night.The end of all is hinted in the start.When we are born we bear the seeds of blight;Around us life & death are torn apart,Yet a great ring of pure and endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heart.It lights the world to my delight.Infinity is present in each part.A loving smile contains all art.The motes of starlight spark & dart.A grain of sand holds power & might.Infinity is present in each part,And a great ring of pure and endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heart. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , A Ring of Endless Light (Austin Family Chronicles, #4)
8 " Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (The Crosswicks Journal, #4)
9 " We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature. "
10 " When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals #1)
11 " Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age. "
12 " Jesus was more forgiving to those who made mistakes in love than to those who judged each other harshly and were cold of heart. "
13 " How long your closet held a whiff of you,Long after hangers hung austere and bare.I would walk in and suddenly the trueSharp sweet sweat scent controlled the airAnd life was in that small still living breath.Where are you? since so much of you is here,Your unique odour quite ignoring death.My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dearAnd vital in my longing empty arms.But other clothes fill up the space, your space,And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.Not of your odour there is not a trace.But something unexpected still breaks throughThe goneness to the presentness of you. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Ordering of Love
14 " If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. "
15 " Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. "
16 " Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. "
17 " I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus? "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (Crosswicks Journal, #2)
18 " You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. "
19 " I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write. "
20 " It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine. "
